Chair Brooks-Powers questions MOCJ on data management system delays since discovery reform

We're going to pivot now to Mach J.

Under Mayor de Blasio, when discovery reform was passed, Mach J took on the role.

of coordinating acquisition and installation of new data management systems for DAs and defenders.

Why is it the case that over six years later, those officers do not yet have the function and systems implemented?

So the data management systems have been a challenge to the system, to the criminal legal system.

We worked with all of the stakeholders to determine and identify components that would be able to integrate with the

current system.

As council is aware, we pursued a vendor not only for the district attorneys, but also for the defense bar in order to actually have the infrastructure that would

ingest the information from NYPD and then categorize and save the information and then allow for the prosecutors to then

transmit that information to defense bar and then defense bar to receive that information in a coherent fashion because one of the things that mock jay heard was that discovery material was coming to them very

um,

aggregated and not cataloged in a way that made it usable.

Unfortunately, in the vendor that was chosen, it seems that there was a capacity challenge so that one of the DA's offices was able to get the

very targeted work that needed to happen.

However, the vendor overestimated the ability to essentially copy the work that it was doing with the first DA's office and go across the system.

Having five DA's offices that have very distinct styles as well as distinct systems that they had originally created on their own, the vendor

took on more than they could chew in terms of being able to actually then do the same very targeted work that they did for one borough and replicate that in a timely fashion for all the other boroughs.

What we now have are offices that have

in the interim built their own internal systems such that they are using the funding that we have advocated for to add personnel and do their own forms of

workarounds to be able to meet their burden of providing discovery.

We still are talking to all of the stakeholders about ways to move forward and where there may be opportunities for technological advancements that will move us to a more one-city seamless approach.

to getting the information not only from the NYPD to the DAs, but appropriately to the defense bar so that we can more effectively handle cases.

Thank you.